Religious Minorities and Cultural Diversity in the Dutch Republic

Religious Minorities and Cultural Diversity in the Dutch Republic explores various aspects of the religious and cultural diversity of the early Dutch Republic and analyses how the different confessional groups established their own identity and how their members interacted with one another in a highly hybrid culture.

This volume is to honour Dr. Piet Visser on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Piet Visser has become a leading scholar in the field of the Anabaptist and Mennonite History. Since January 1, 2002, he served as the chair of Anabaptist/Mennonite History and Kindred Spirits at the Doopsgezind Seminarium, VU-University, Amsterdam.

Reviews

"(...) the individual contributions of the volume combined reveal some tantalizing “new historiographic” glimpses of the various threads of the interactive Anabaptist/Mennonite web and the dialogic processes at work in the religious Tower of Babel that was the Dutch Republic" Markus Vink, in: Journal of Early Modern History Vol. 20 (2016).

"This valuable Festschrift presents recent scholarship in the English language on Anabaptism in the Netherlands. (...) [it] fittingly celebrates the extensive contribution Piet Visser has made to the study of Anabaptism in the Netherlands." James W. Lowry, Amsterdam Archives Project, in Renaissance Quarterly Volume lxix, no. 3 (2016).

"Most of the articles are empirical studies of tightly defined subjects. They thus match the kind of detailed examinations of communities, books, printers and texts from the Dutch Republic that specialists expect from Piet Visser himself. Individual contributions in this book will be useful for historians of the early modern Low Countries. The collection is a fitting tribute to a scholar whose deep expertise in the history of the Dutch Mennonites has been so valuable to scholars." Jesse Spohnholz, in: Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. XLVI/2 (2015).

Table of contents

Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Gary K. Waite, A reappraisal of the Contribution of Anabaptists to the Religious Culture and Intellectual Climate of the Dutch Republic
Hans de Waardt, I Beg your Pardon: I am a Heretic! A Countryside conventicler in Holland in the 1520s
August den Hollander, The Edition History of the Deux Aes Bible
Wim François, Mattheus Jacobszoon’s New Testament and the Addition of Registers and the Epistle to the Laodiceans to Dutch Mennonite Bibles
Walter S. Melion, ‘Caelatum in transitu’: Karel van Mander’s ’The Nativity Broadcast by Prophets of the Incarnation’ and its Visual Referents
Mirjam van Veen, ‘…your praise worthy town Deventer…’ Caspar Coolhaes on Unity and Religious Tolerance
Alastair Hamilton, The Spirituality of Hiel
Willem J. op’ t Hof, Lusthof des Gemoets in Comparison and Competition with ‘De practycke ofte oeffeninghe der godtzaligheydt’. Vredestad and Reformed Piety in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture
Mary S. Sprunger, Being Mennonite: Neighborhood, Class and Religious Identity in Golden Age Amsterdam
Anna Voolstra, Membership Required? The Twofold Practice of Believer’s Baptism within Mennonite Lamist and Zonist Congregations during the 17th and 18th Centuries
Willem Heijting, Christian Hoburg’s ‘Lebendige Hertzens-Theologie (1661)‘: A Book in the Heart of Seventeenth-Century Spirituality
Douglas H. Shantz, Religion and Spinoza in Jonathan Israel’s Interpretation of the Enlightenment.
Fred van Lieburg, Mennonite Preachers on the Dutch pastoral market, 1650-1865
Christoph Burger, God Ensures the Existing Order: A Lutheran Minister’s Sermon for a Day of Repentance in the Year 1788
Yme Kuiper, Mennonites and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Friesland
George Harinck, “The Tares in the Wheat”. Henry E. Dosker’s Calvinist Historiography of Dutch Anabaptism
Index

Edited by Scott Mandelbrote (University of Cambridge) and Joanna Weinberg (University of Oxford)

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